July 24, 2008

Now that the noun 'retard' is frowned upon, we need a civilized replacement. I propose the (rhyming) noun petard, meaning some dumb bastard -- like P.Z. Myers, the world's first official petard -- who, yes, hoists his own self high: and has no idea...

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet."

Myers is the very model of a modern charismatic prophet. What a maroon.

May 08, 2008

Another intimation of MacIntyro-Nietzschean fusionism, courtesy of Nicola Karras:

The only answer we have yet found to the
argument—perhaps the only answer there can ever be—is in the value of
the argument itself. Our telos can be found, if
nowhere else, in continuing our search for it. The struggle itself
towards the heights is enough to fill the heart of a man. One must
imagine the Humanities student happy.

The 'must' is doing most of the work here, followed by 'one', with 'happy' bringing up the rear. The ancient discovery that our telos is only ever recognizable as our search for it was replaced in modern times by the radically different idea that our telos is only recognizable as the history of our search. The postmodern task, if you'll permit me, is to heal this divide. We cannot and should not forget history. If we are stuck with virtue, we are also stuck with the world as the expressly historical world. But we must also recognize -- in a way to which religion, I think, is of great importance -- that fate and history are not identical, that fate is how the ancients lived in the present and history how moderns lived so awkwardly in the future.

The Christian bridge between these positions involved living wholly in the present in whole, constant anticipation of the future: a powerful premonition of the later credo (somehow both dumbed-down and tarted-up) "Become who you are." The key to striking what seems like this mystical balance between passivity and agency is the obsession of the late moderns; left postmoderns typically want it to emit from the immanent self, whereas, I reckon, right postmoderns want to note that the mystically immanent self actually has much less self there than their left opposite numbers desire; that occupying that space, not terribly mystically, are the external authorities of particular narratives, particular others, and -- are you with me? -- a particular God.

May 07, 2008

I'm just a little late here, but if you like Rawls-and-Nozick talk, Prof. D.L. Schaefer's reconsideration of the two at the, uh, New York Sun sports page is worth a read:

Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on
political life, relegating considerations of feasibility (i.e., of
conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings) to be
resolved by others, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.”

Either you love this sort of thing or you hate it. To loop back to an earlier conversation, the big problem with abstract justice from, I suspect, any 'perspective' is that it problematizes raising children -- because it can't explain good childrearing in terms of justice. Even Locke had to go in for natural emancipation at age 16. Rawls and Nozick both become crippled by an autism of justice when it comes to children, who represent not only individual human agents that should be able to leave their families as thriving members of their polity but individual human agents that should be able to leave their polities as thriving members of the cosmos.

Since Hobbes, a string of political theorists have well understood that the beauty of geometric truth is its correspondence between the abstract and particular -- any particular right angle will always also be a right angle in the abstract. What theorists have sometimes missed is that philosophy can't mirror nature in this perfectly-corresponding way because geometry, unlike, say, physics, is a relational science, the science of relations. It's not a science of bodies in motion. A philosophy that, in order to master human order, makes itself materialist can mirror geometry, but it can't tell us which geometry should be mirrored. So Badiou's attempt to express justice by set theory, disproving absolutist Hobbesian justice, is an interesting metaphor that, to many smart people today, better expresses what it means to be human. But that only underscores how even our most rarified abstractions really only gain purchase to the extent that they recapitulate and generalize cumulative particular narratives about our own interconnected lives.

NOW -- I go through all this because family is an inextricable part of our interconnected lives. It isn't everything, but even the extent to which it isn't is mostly resonant as the negative space around family. Family is a 'problem' with or without abstract political philosophy, in the same way that 'life itself' is, should be, and must be a problem, but abstract political philosophy exacerbates the general problem. Interestingly, I think there's a push lately away from trying to solve the special anxiety that family causes as an ineradicable remainder in abstract political philosophy. Theorists want, I think, to follow Martha Nussbaum's lead in recognizing that this problem is better coped with therapeutically than solved scientifically. This makes sense if you read the obsession of the abstract philosophers as not actually justice but suffering; and if it turns out that even a complete system of justice leaves remainders of suffering, it looks like theorists dedicated to such political systemization can tolerate a certain kind of suffering, too -- less the remainders they can't eliminate than the anxiety of coping with those remainders.

And to the extent that they succeed, the original remainders -- the 'injustices' of family -- get translated socially into the anxiety of coping with our unmoored reactions to those injustices -- 'counter-injustices' like one day leaving your wife, committing adultery, lying to your parents, in short, breaking the bonds of family on an ad hoc, pragmatic basis. 'Practical morality' of a Rortyan sort sneaks into abstract political regimes through the seams and comes, I suspect, to dominate the whole. But while Rorty would reject any attempt to mirror even geometry, if not physics, I'd suggest that practical morality can learn how to cope with, and even flourish within, political societies whose institutional architecture is significantly the outgrowth of abstract philosophy. The question is for how long -- and probably 19th-century France is one good place to look for an answer.

April 21, 2008

One of the few things Alexis de Tocqueville most underrated was the affinity in contemporary times between Catholicism and pantheism. I know this may be a revolting and outrageous idea, or allegation, to a fair number of friends and/or readers. But I have thought it over and have decided to move forward with it. For now I can only point you to The Immanent Frame, specifically to William Connolly's brief for pantheism (though he doesn't call it this), one of the plainest, frankest, and 'best' (yes, because it's Nietzschean) that I've seen in a while.

My main concern is that Taylor, and Catholics like him, are inclined to cede vast amounts of territory to the main thrusts and attitudes of the pantheist creed -- most importantly, the holiness ofalllove, in all its physicality, as an immanent and transcendent experience of peaceful yet powerful becoming in time -- as long as the Church and the Nicene Creed are kept intact. For at least a handful of Protestants, this amounts to something resembling worst nightmare territory. For what it's worth.

April 17, 2008

Alain Badiou has come in for some scorn somewhere back in the mists of time at this site. But revisiting him lately in an attempt to reconsider the aristocratic ethos in fully modern times, one is struck I'm impressed by how well some of his central insights (ones which aren't derived from a love of equality or from set theory) fit with what I've considered a very pomocon critique of hegemonic (left) postmodernism:

I must particularly insist that the formula "respect for the Other" has
nothing to do with any serious definition of Good and Evil. What does
"respect for the Other" mean when one is at war against an enemy, when
one is brutally left by a woman for someone else, when one must judge
the works of a mediocre "artist," when science is faced with
obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is the "respect for Others"
that is injurious, that is Evil. Especially when it is resistance
against others, or even hatred of others, that drives a subjectively
just action. And it's always in these kinds of circumstances (violent
conflicts, brutal changes, passionate loves, artistic creations) that
the question of Evil can be truly asked for a subject. Evil does not
exist either as nature or as law. It exists, and varies, in the
singular becoming of the True.

Hmm. Beating bad girls, bad art, and bad science with the same ugly stick raises questions of its own, but it certainly is amusing. Best of all, however, Badiou denies the ontological status of abstract otherhood (and with it, by implication, the notion that a state of being should be taken as a being) -- a central tenet of any pomo conservatism I'd associate myself with.

I'd also particularly like to hear from the Yale Mafia about all this. Ladies? Gentlemen?

April 08, 2008

At TAS, Matt Feeney delivers what might be the funniest and most well-conceived blog post of the year. Absolutely hopeless trying to pull a quote. Read it all. Big surprise: it's rife with implications for long conversations about prospects for postmodern conservatives. The main question is whether deconstruction has political implications, and whereas Stanley Fish says no, and Derrida goes so far as to say it's "justice" (this from the guy who also said Nietzsche's corpus might always only mean "I forgot my umbrella), Feeney sensibly enough says yes.

Briefly, all too briefly, I would contend that Matt's generally right and that's where the fun starts. Because Fish's claim that deconstruction does not (as opposed to should not) have political implications is a claim to what I call interobjectivity -- that is, to a shared and sharable conviction of the authoritatively true existence of a metaphysical item. (I continue to refine this definition.) It's not quite the whole story to say that Fish is just baldly masking a subjective preference with a truth claim. And it's not quite right either to say that Fish, as a bourgeois postmodern liberal, can, by the standards of authority internal to his own political philosophy, proclaim deconstruction as neutral with regard to 'political implications' and stop there. The phrase 'political implications' itself, in what it does and does not say, is positively rife with political implications. At its worst, as Matt hints, it can license "a trace of rapt passivity;" at its best, it can invite us to deconstruct what's going on when someone (contentedly or otherwise) settles for hovering over the surface of the world with the careful abstraction 'political implications' instead of saying more forthrightly that MY political philosophy can neither be attacked nor defended by recourse to any of the principles or conclusions of deconstruction.

Ironically I think one of the more pomocon things to do is to recognize that deconstruction does not equally threaten all political philosophies. But again this raises more questions than it answers. When it all boils down, Rorty and Fish (for instance) may paradoxically be able to rely on the United States Armed Forces to perpetuate and protect a system without any of their interests at the fore which nonetheless guarantees their best chance of survival and even flourishing. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism is parasitic on a global political system that's largely inimical to it. Yes, this is something of a dig, but then again Plato long ago recognized that this relationship also basically describes that between philosophy and democracy, at least until some philosopher or group of philosophers encounters the unthinkable (the people nominate them to rule or one day a ruler turns out to have been a philosopher). Whether or not a postmodern bourgeois liberal can cop to this relationship requires them to take a certain stance on politics, one which deconstructs Rorty's claim that we should/do call truth whatever wins in an 'open encounter'.

So what political philosophies are not as threatened by deconstruction as postmodern bourgeois liberalism? Well, postmodern conservatism, for one. Why? Fewer inherent contradictions and (perhaps because of) a more circumscribed commitment to social justice, I suspect. Postmodern conservatives, I think I'd like to suggest, recognize that truth is actually thrown into a constant state of extremity and crisis, or at least can't flourish, when all encounters are truly 'open'. This is different than the kind of cabalism that Straussians are accused of. It's more Aristotelian, insofar as it credits practical reason as a sharable resource for the maintenance and recovery of interobjectivity. But it's also Platonist insofar as it recognizes that the quest for a society of truly open encounters is a deconstructive project that never ends, and deconstructs some of the most noble and enjoyable things available to creative yet faithful human beings. The quest for the truly open encounter is a project of cumulative abstraction masquerading as a celebration of particularity. In that sense, it's like the charge leveled by Tocquevillian conservatives against modern liberals -- you think you're reveling in real diversity but it's really just a superficial compensation for the ubiquitous homogenization of equality.

In Nietzsche's terms, the point is more ominous: the only true diversity is a diversity of nobles. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism works overtime to avoid this conclusion, and to do so it requires of its nobles an endless set of shrugs when presented with the question of whether they are their own society's nobles. Pretty chintzy -- whereas postmodern conservatism -- even of a bourgeois variety -- would be more inclined to credit its own nobles with their nobility, even as it recognizes the virtues in permitting all manner of shades and subtext and subtlety when it comes to talking about and acting out nobility. Rah-rah sessions: generally to be avoided, and to be undertaken with the utmost care when necessary. That, too, has political implications, but my own claim is that, properly understood, deconstruction is like fire: it deserves respect and a little fear but, handled well, will not burn down the political philosophy of a well-informed postmodern conservative. But this in turn requires that the house of that philosophy is built with an eye toward the dangers of fire. And I suppose the bottom line is that a postmodern conservative thinks a postmodern bourgeois liberal is playing with fire but pretending not to be, whereas he or she the postmodern conservative is either not playing with fire or isn't pretending. And indeed, to make Aristotle suffer through a dance with Nietzsche, that not everyone can play well with fire.

That's where the 'political implications' come back in, in their honest guise as political morality, concerning the question of what nonpolitical standards should come into play in judging better and worse regimes. For this reason, America is a special treat for postmodern conservatives, because here is a place that doesn't always do as you'd like but which will probably always be okay in the end if its citizens aren't seduced away from their providential combination of small-bore innovation and wide-lens fidelity.

March 27, 2008

Rome, Georgia that is. Berry College is a beautiful locale -- 'campus' doesn't quite capture the vastness and silence and pretty architecture and phalanx of deer grazing in one of the 800 quads. Not enough time to get into the content of the talks and lectures and discussions, which have raised some pretty significant issues about the link between culture and nature yesterday and concerning a putative 'crisis' of civic education today. I've scrawled some notes down for posting later, but the wireless connection is sporadically reliable -- that or my laptop is -- so for now see J-Knip's blurb.

1. Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. Wrestling with why and how we humans tell stories about other people is a difficult task made pleasantly more difficult by this ur-text of philosophical narrativity. Plus there are action-adventure sequences that put 300 in the shade, if you have a visual imagination.

2. Larry Leon Craig's The War Lover.* Plato is easily to be preferred to Aristotle on the level of mere entertainment value, but The Republic still often seems the most obtuse, meandering, and overlong of the dialogues to the person working their way through the Platonic corpus. Craig manages to throw the whole thing into focus such that you can picture whole, in a single mental glance, what it is Socrates and/or Plato are driving at -- while simultaneously realizing that that whole takes a lifetime, if you're lucky, to comprehend. Craig's writing style on top of it all has all the right moves.

3. MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The marquee title is the prequel, After Virtue, but this colossal tome is MacIntyre at his best, most nuanced, and most persuasive. After Virtue leaves a lot of questions without answers, and the most recent Dependent Rational Animals provides, I think, some wrong answers of great quality if not quantity. Concerning style points, watch out: MacIntyre occasionally writes paragraph-long sentences under conditions of extreme comma austerity. Best read aloud.

4. Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. Billed as the first romantic novel, the really big surprise here is that angsty entitled people consumed by the crippling self-consciousness of their own superfluous appetites were waltzing around the West looooong before today. Constant, like all super-literate compulsive gamblers, knew well how squeezing the heroic passions out of political environments deeply steeped in them caused big trouble for the mental health of its men.

5. In accord with established practice, I'll also cram in Nietzsche's The Gay Science; Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution; and Rieff's Fellow Teachers. But you probably knew that already. So pick up Alexander Stephens' monumental Constitutional View of the War between the States, a dazzling look at one of those lost American freaks of nature -- in the superlative sense -- who, along with Lincoln, gives you the perfect picture of everything noble and ignoble, reasonable and blockheaded, practical and fanciful that's commingled in the American mind.